An explosion echoed through the cargo vessel's superstructure, rattling its fixtures and shaking its captain, Pulsar, awake from his doze at the pilot's seat. He'd configured the vessel for a straight shot to cluster distribution point 49 - the starmap showed a clear line of sight, and nothing had looked off in the skies before he'd closed his eyes.
It was quite clear now as he looked out of the armoured windows at the spatter of colour and light, its glow illuminating even the dark cockpit where he sat. He had jumped into a god-damn baby nebula. Some nearby star must have went off without anyone noticing; he aligned his exterior cameras and identified the epicentre in the distance, the tiny white dwarf left where a star would be, and snapped some pictures as he picked up his radio.
"Starburst, starburst, starburst," he barked, thumbing buttons on his console. "Position... Quataris, I think, block 2E. Looks early-stage."
He released his PTT and listened, but all he could hear was the bip-bip-bip of the quantum communicator synchronisation signal. The nebula seemed to be interfering with his antenna; if he strained to listen, he could also hear what sounded like the sea lapping at a shore, the charged particles from the cataclysm striking the mast and depolarising the carefully-aligned electron beam within.
He knew the danger. Space this dense doesn't play nice with hypermagnetopulse systems. It gathers at the tip of the bubble formed around the vessel and triggers instantaneous fusion, releasing a dearth of energy that could only be mitigated by the tungsten-ceramic shock cone at the front of his hauler. Looking out, he could see it was still cooling from the last detonation, a dull red glow against the rainbow spatter of the space beyond.
Pulsar gritted his teeth. Leaning over, he thumbed the raster displays. Reactor power: one-twenty-five percent. Coolant pumps: all in service, twenty-five percent overpressure. Hypermagnetopulse system: cooled, supercapacitors charged, all in service.
Time to ride the storm.
